Of Darkened Realms
by Klumzi
Summary: Why Jill has such difficulty with dark, underground places, and how Eustace reminds her of how to overcome that fear.


A/N: My take on why Jill was so fearful of the earthmen's pathway home. Everything concerning Narnia belongs to the brilliant C.S. Lewis.

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><p>OF DARKENED REALMS<p>

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><p>The worst place Jill could fathom being in was the very tight, very damp and completely lightless supply closet within the school gym. It was rank, saturated with the odors of mops left to mildew, stains formed form an endless leak in the pipe works, and an assortment of abandoned gym clothes that had simply been left to rot on the floor. Jill became very good friends with the brooms jutting this way and that into her ribs and shoulders. She became very good friends with the spiders crawling through her hair.<p>

It was all thanks to Them.

Despite her relatively quiet nature (shyness makes silence a tendency) and normalcy that allowed her to blend in with a crowd—at least, in Jill's opinion—They had taken notice of her. Oh yes, They made it unerringly evident to her that they had taken notice. Previous to her ever having met her best friend, or having ever smelled a whiff of Narnia beyond the Door for that matter, Jill had been designated as a Target. For reasons hopelessly beyond her grasp, They had set Their sights on her and had not looked away, a fact that would bring the girl more grief than she could verbalize… that is, until she had no choice but to.

It began on a day as dreary and damp as the cold infesting deep into Jill's chest and sinuses made her feel. To start a term at a new school would not have produced much anxiety for her, prone to self-prescribed isolation as she was, if it weren't for the horrid black marks this new school had smeared across its reputation. The Master was callous and uncouth, allowing a riotous tag-a-long gang to bully (the word he used was "instruct") and torment (the term he preferred was "characterize") their fellow class members. For Their Targets—picked out of the masses to be primarily "taught", though They never refrained from punishing any and all at will—this meant a constantly miserable experience of dreading Their next lesson. It typically involved a dousing in the loo, usually involved fists or feet, and sometimes… oh, sometimes it meant worse.

Jill was Their sometime.

So it was on this bleak day that Jill passed from the relative warmth of the corridor where the drafts from the storm weren't too bad, as the halls were swollen with people moving to and fro, into the blue-tinted lecture room that was meant to house her Foreign Literature studies. Only, no one was there. The seats were vacant, the lights were off, and completely puzzled, Jill halted and chewed her bottom lip.

"Didn't you hear?" came a voice from the corner, and Jill jumped in surprise, turning to find—her heart sputtered—one of Them approaching.

"Class was moved to a different room," said another, emerging as well. "Drafts in this one and all, you know."

"Oh," Jill said, in a voice too small to be properly heard. She took a step back. "Then I guess I'll—"

The door was shut with a soft click behind her and Jill whirled, clutching her book bag to her chest defensively. The one who had closed the door grinned nastily.

"Of course you didn't know," he said, hand trailing off the doorknob. "We made sure you wouldn't." He held up a bright green square of paper. "Nicked the notice from your mail folder, you see."

Jill tried to swallow as they advanced, finding her throat was too dry. Her nose, on the other hand, was far too wet and she resisted the urge to pull out yet another tissue from her pocket and blow. Now was hardly the time to be worrying about a runny nose. She set her eyes on the forefront of the group and said, "What do you want?" in a voice that only, to her credit, trembled a little.

"For you to come with us" was the unrevealing answer. Next moment, Jill gave a yelp as her arms were caught and she was bodily hauled back, away from the classroom's front door, to the adjacent door that opened to a separate corridor. It was relatively empty, as most students were in lessons, and the few that still traversed the hall immediately made themselves scarce at the sight of who was stalking onward with their victim. Jill couldn't really blame them, though a savage part of her wanted to, because she knew that, if she were them, she would have disappeared too.

She kicked and tried to scratch, caught as her arms were in the grip of two boys much bigger and stronger than she. Jill had always been petite and she resented it now, most bitterly, as her efforts gained her nothing but a stinging slap that made her ears ring and her head buzz. Shaking her head to try to clear it, she blinked dazedly as the footfalls of the group echoed and she realized they were in the gym, empty until the afternoon rec hours, and they were steadily approaching a door she had never paid much attention to before.

They swung it wide open, giving her hardly a second to take in a dark cramped closet before They pushed her forward and slammed the door shut. There was a faint click and many voices guffawing in wicked glee before fading footfalls.

Jill tried to keep breathing steadily.

She had always been frightened of the dark, nervous of the unseen, wary of the _nothingness_ that darkness always invited.

Now, with broom handles jamming into her ribs, cold and clammy soaking into her skin, she drew an arm up and ran her sleeve beneath her runny nose. Then she tried to find the doorknob. Her nails scratched the door before finding the frigid knob and yanking on it.

Locked. Of course.

Her already-tight chest heaved and Jill clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle her rising sobs. _Think_, Jill said, shifting to try to ease the way the cramped quarters made the corner of one of her textbooks stab her stomach. _Calm. They have to let me out eventually. Right?_

'Eventually' turned out to be long enough that her toes and hands had gone numb, her eyes were dropping with weariness, and her nose was chaffed from trying to stem the snot that accompanied a cold. Her lungs burned in a foreboding way and her breath rattled.

Then, piercing light…

Jill squinted as the door swung wide and she turned her head to find a young girl she didn't recognize standing in the doorway, looking nervous.

"They told me to let you out," she said in a rush before vanishing in a hurry, as if fearful that she would be forced to take Jill's place in the closet.

Jill made to move, forcing her stiffened body to respond to her commands. Stumbling, she wedged her way out of the closet and fell to her hands and knees. A crackling cough escaped her, leaving her gasping for breath when it finally ended and her sides ached.

It was past midday when Jill managed to make it to her dorm room and collapse onto her bed. Everything moved in a filmy haze, sounds were dull and dim. She thought someone hovered over her, a cold hand touching her brow, and mumbled voices. The next conscientious moment she had was staring up at a woman with a white dress and a red cross on her hat, with soft hands and a tsking tongue.

"Pneumonia," she said, in a far distance that Jill couldn't quite reach, and clucked her tongue again. "Poor chick. You've got a bad case of it, I fear. Off to the infirmary with you."

Things were a bit muddled after that, until Jill woke early the next morning to find herself on a sick bed in the school's infirmary wing, feeling as if her tongue had been coated in cotton and her eyes had been glued shut. Her lungs, though, bothered her the most, burning with a cold fire as they were and seemingly turned to lead, they were so heavy. It was a seemingly endless round of routine antibiotics and testing of vitals before she was released to return to her own dorm and her own bed. Within a week following her return, she was cleared to resume her studies.

And to Their lessons.

By the third time Jill was shoved into the closet—her hands caught on the door frame and she resisted so ferociously that They nearly broke her right arm in their struggle with her—and heard the familiar click that kept her in place, and inhaled the brewing fumes of half-empty cleaner bottles and mold from the leaking pipe-works, she cried.

By the eighth time, she had managed to elude Them for long enough that they punished her by leaving her there all night.

By the fifteenth time, she gave up fighting.

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><p>When Scrubb found her crying behind the gym, she couldn't very well tell him that she had just been released from her prison. If he were to peer closely at her hair, he'd find strands of cobwebs clinging where she had brushed against a web. If he sat too close, he'd smell the left-over fumes of that dreadful place. But she held him off, tried to keep him at a distance, until he spoke of Someplace else altogether.<p>

When he told her about a place he knew where no one was bullied, she wanted to scoff at him and ask who he thought he was, toying with her like this. Her eyebrows shot up when he spoke of Someone from that Someplace who could guide them there, keep them safe.

When they walked through the door, she knew he hadn't been lying.

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><p>Standing before the narrow, threatening crag, she froze. It was hardly more than a darker gap within an already dark hole, and the thought of willingly lowering herself into its taunting maws chilled her blood to icy shards that made her body quiver with pain. Her shadow jumped and swayed as the lights from the little earthmen moved further down the ragged hole and then there was sharp prodding at her back for her to go on as well.<p>

_No!_ her mind immediately rebelled, absorbing the darkness, quivering before its cramped size. She felt the poking of the spears around her and felt instead the stabbing of broom handles, the splinters from mop-handles. She smelled the stale bleach of rags pressing too close to her face. _No!_

"I can't go in there!" Her voice escaped her in a wretched wail, flung out into the dark cavern with enough force that Puddleglum jumped in surprise and Scrubb stared. "I can't! I won't!"

A hand was laid on her shoulder, halting her stumbling retreat. "Steady, Pole," Puddleglum began, continuing on in what was no doubt meant to be reassuring tones, but only spoke of rain, and Jill remembered the cold drips of tears sliming her cheeks and sleeves as she was left alone for so many long, long, lonely hours in the dark.

"You don't understand," she returned desperately, half-babbling with maddened fear. How could she possibly explain? How to begin?

Then Scrubb stepped forward, glancing from the earthmen watching impatiently, weapons brandished, to her. And his eyes, as they found hers, spoke that he could see her fear, and he _knew_—if not of her own personal turmoil, but of his _own._ Hadn't he, after all, been a victim of Them as well? Hadn't he faced enemies of far greater grandeur than They, and won?

Hadn't she…?

"You are not alone," he whispered, bowing towards her ear to offer the comfort while keeping his eye on the earthmen. His hand reached out and his cold fingers found her wrist, his thumb brushing across her racing pulse. "Think of how _I_ felt on that cliff. Remember, Pole, who it was that sent us here. They can't truly harm us if we trust Him."

Jill gazed back, finding his expression was wide open to be read, displaying without a hint of embarrassment or hesitancy of his utter support. He asked for Puddleglum to go before her, reassuring that he would be right behind, and she slowly nodded. Looking to the nasty hole in the dark, she clung to the strength that reassurance gave of her friends being close to her as she moved further into darkened realms, breaking past the paralyzing hopelessness that dug malevolent claws into her joints and stiffened them in place.

"I'm not alone," she whispered to herself, almost soundlessly. But Scrubb caught it, standing right behind her (as he'd said he'd be), and he nodded once, firmly.

Puddleglum urged her onward, speaking of comfort, no doubt stretching for something helpful to say despite his unerring habit for the bleak, and she gave a sharp barking laugh in response, but refused to let her fear rise up again. _Remember who sent us here._ Scrubb spoke the truth, after all. He had sat beside her in the dirt that long-passed fateful day—she knew now, in retrospect, that he had been indeed close enough to notice the cobwebs and the smell of cleaner, but hadn't mentioned it—and he had told her of a place where They couldn't touch her. He had been right.

_He_ was right.

Holding to that, she lowered down until she was on her belly, inching forward on her elbows, and let Scrubb's voice guide her as she entered the dark.


End file.
